Weekend Respite, Eh?

We had planned to go away for President's Day weekend for a while.  We were hoping San Diego, maybe Hawaii an then when everything happened over Christmas we decided to skip any plans because we didn't know what would be going on for us at this time. Once we figured treatments wouldn't start yet, we tried to find something last minute and booked a house on the Pacific Ocean in British Colombia, Canada.  The goal was to relax and get our minds off of all of our decisions.

What we didn't anticipate was that customs would take an hour, we couldn't use our cell phones in Canada and everything would be closed in this beach town for winter!!!

At least the weather here was so nice we could have the sun roof open!

Of course we figured our way around these things eventually.

The house was very nice and had magnificent views to wake up to each morning.  The sunshine was so plentiful that the kids begged to close the curtains because it was making them too hot!  Sunday we woke up, made chocolate chip pancakes and played some board games.  (This game is called Robot Turtle and it's an easy way to teach kids about computer programming!)

The kids played on the front yard and practiced ball room dancing...

And we all just reveled in the mountains and the water

 We wanted to explore a little bit and drove to a tourist town with some hiking to find that it was all pretty vacant for the winter and quite windy.  All the way along the drive however was a magnificent snow capped mountain view graced by the pacific coast.  We found a little tavern to have lunch and watch the waterfront views.

On the way back we stopped at a store and bought some local seafood and headed home to enjoy the hot tub!

  We laid around some more the next day, watched some movies and decided to try to find a place to have dinner.  On the drive to a tuna restaurant we saw some cool black tailed deer alongside the road.

And this road sign that the Canadians put up in my honor:

That restaurant was also closed and so we drove down to a waterfront place that was a little nicer.  I ran in to check the menu and the specials were celery ravoli, duck and lamb.  I knew there was no way my kids were eating there so we agreed to grab some pizza.  On the way back to the car we took a glance toward the water and saw the most amazing sunset I've ever seen setting over an area known as Whiffen Spit.  We walked out on to the spit and just gazed at the magnificent colors in the sky.  It was absolutely breathtaking!

We got some pizza takeout and headed home to snuggle up together.

The next day we walked down to the beach from our house and enjoyed time playing and climbing.  It was a rocky beach and so Noah and Maeve (and Paul) began climbing the cliffs and rocks and made me very nervous.  They enjoyed skipping stones and throwing large rocks in the water making loud kerplunk sounds.  Noah found a crab skeleton, some large muscle shells and lots of other goodies.

There was a ton of driftwood everywhere and we happened upon this driftwood seesaw that we had a blast with!

On Tuesday morning we packed up and began the ride home via Victoria.  I brought along some nicer clothes so that we could have high tea at the Fairmont Empress, where Queen Elizabeth, Rudyard Kipling and other notables have enjoyed tea over the years.  It was fabulous!!!  

The rest of the ride home was graced with views of Mount Baker and perfect blue skies.  It was so gorgeous that I kept telling Paul I saw angels in the skies traveling with us.

Paul and I did spend some time in the afternoon one day poring through clinical study options, treatment schedules and diagrams from our architect for the new house.  We decided a few hours of grown up stuff was more than enough and we quickly resigned ourselves to a dvd of love story movies a friend gave us!